Essay Guideline

If you are seriously considering applying to college or any graduate school, part of the preparation that you cannot ignore, aside from taking the required standardized tests, is the preparation of a well-crafted college admission essay or graduate school admission essay, including MBA essay, as part of your application to college or grad school. This part of the application process is a measurement of your personality, and constitutes an integral part of the admissions process. With the number of applicants wanting to pursue higher education dramatically rising since the early 90’s, many colleges and post-graduate schools have imposed certain safeguards to regulate the entry of admitted applicants to their programs. The goal is to admit only candidates who hold promise and are likely to succeed in their chosen field of endeavor. The college admission essay or graduate school admission essay, including MBA essay, is one such safeguard.

It is important, therefore, to come up with a well-polished college admission essay or graduate school admission essay, including MBA essay. And doing so need not be a problem if you are capable of articulating your experiences in written form quite well.

What do you actually need to present in a college admission essay or graduate school admission essay, including MBA essay? It varies actually. Some schools have several specific topics from which you are required to choose and write about. However, on the average, admissions essays usually seek to present you as an individual. This may include a listing of your past and present experiences, your nature, preferences, ideals, principles, family and social backgrounds, your school years, grades received, extracurricular activities, etc. But these are not simply listed down. The essay should seek to present these profiles in clear and specific details and preferably, accompanied with one or two related anecdotes.

The area of extracurricular activities will be of particular significance. Many admissions officers are no longer impressed with high test scores as well as high grades. They realize that these do not represent the total you. They are not satisfied with the numerical side of yourself. What they would like is to get to know more about you and the activities you got involved in, which may be presented in the college admission essay or graduate school admission essay, including MBA essay. Specifically, they want you to present evidence that your field of expertise, for which you are seeking further studies on, is one that is very close to your heart. That being the case, you naturally do not limit your knowledge of the field to theoretical concepts in school. You go out and engage in projects wherein you are able to apply school theories in actual situations.

Such evidences, again, as written down in the college admission essay or graduate school admission essay, including MBA essay - as the case may be, along with an excellent school record as well as a good performance in the admissions test, will persuade school administrators that you are capable of adding something significant to your selected field of study and their school in particular.

However, such evidences should not be listed down in general terms. What is usually required in many college admission essays or graduate school admission essays, including MBA essays are specifics. Detailed accounts of the off-campus undertakings that you immersed yourself in while attending school. Undertakings that are directly connected to your area of concentration. A good example would be something like the following: wanting to enter medical school, you decided to sign up, in the final year of your pre-med course, as a volunteer in the relief operations organized by the group Band-Aid to help the famine-stricken country of Ethiopia. There, your eyes were opened to the harsh reality that not everything is ok in the world. You began to acknowledge that while a number of countries may be well-off, countless others are living way below certain human standards of living. And they are in dire need, not only of food and shelter, but such other basic necessities like medicine and health care.

The college admission essay or graduate school admission essay, including MBA essay affords you the opportunity to present yourself as someone capable of sharing something significant in a particular field, and not just a mere statistic in the same. As such, you are encouraged to get involved in extracurricular endeavors while in the midst of completing your courses of study and to cite these in your college admission essay or graduate school admission essay, including MBA essay. This will make your piece more convincing as well as effective, as it will give solid proof that you are not merely satisfied with meeting course requirements. You are also applying in real life the lessons taught to you inside the classroom.

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Whether you are working on a writing assignment for a class or are faced with the chore of putting together an essay to be submitted along with an MBA application, the same basic questions arise: How do I start this thing? What is the best way of putting my ideas down on paper? How do I get my point across to the reader?

There is no great mystery involved here. There are four fundamental steps that must be followed in order to create a clear, readable essay that is on the mark and displays your best effort.

The first step is to fully understand the assignment and to reflect on what you are being asked to do. What is the topic? What ancillary themes are supposed to be written about? Is there a particular style that is required, such as autobiographical writing? If, for example, the instructions indicate that the essay is to be about “…a major crisis in your life, how you faced it, and what it taught you about yourself, including heretofore unrecognized weaknesses,” then you would need to put a great deal of thought into your own life experiences.

Yes, there are times when you cannot think of any experience in your life which meshes with the assigned topic. Maybe you have never faced a crisis. Lucky you. If that is the case, then you may need to bring the topic down a little…from crisis to problem. It is generally acceptable to write about a slightly different theme from the one that is being called for, if you must. In example stated above, you would simply indicate that the problem about which you are going to write is the closest to a crisis that you have ever experienced.

Some people, when they cannot think of an experience from their own lives that fits the assigned topic, borrow events form other people’s lives or they fabricate situations for use in their essays. This is generally not a good idea for two reasons. If you are being asked to write about your own life, then using someone else’s experiences or manufacturing an incident may result in an essay that does not ring true. There is also the possibility that your creative attempts may be discerned by the reader.

In any case, once you have fully understood and spent time thinking about the assigned topic, it time for the second step-planning your essay. The best method, in terms of planning a well-organized essay, is to write an outline. You may use any format that is comfortable for you, from scratch notes to a formal outline, such as the one below, in which what is written next to each Roman numeral (in bold) is what will be in a paragraph in the actual essay:

My Greatest Crisis

1. Everyone faces problems at one time or another.
   1. Most problems are solvable.
   2. Some problems are serious enough to be called crises.
   3. Dealing with a crisis is difficult.
   4. Sometimes, there is not satisfactory solution to a crisis.
   5. The effects of some crises may be long-lasting.
2. I faced a crisis when my mother developed Alzheimer’s Disease.
   1. The responsibility of caring for her fell to me.
   2. At first, my mother moved in with my wife and me, and I was able to take care of her, with help from my wife and a neighbor.
   3. As my mother’s condition deteriorated, I had to spend more time with her.
      1. My wife and I rarely went out after work or on weekends, and I sometimes had to take days off from my job.
      2. The neighbor felt that she could not cope with my mother’s worsening condition.
      3. My mother’s illness made it impossible for us to invite people to our house.
   4. The neurologist who was caring for my mother stated that she would soon need twenty-four hour a day care.
   5. I was adamant in my refusal to lodge my mother in a facility.
   6. She fell, fracturing her hip, and was hospitalized.
   7. After surgery, she was transferred to a skilled nursing facility.
3. Dealing with my sense of guilt.
   1. At first my mother hated the nursing home, and I felt guilty about abandoning her.
   2. I decided to bring her home.
   3. The director of the facility advised me to give her a chance to acclimate herself.
   4. My wife assured me that she was not against my mother returning to our house, but she asked me to do as the director had advised.
   5. After two guilty, torturous weeks, I was relieved to discover that my mother seemed to feel comfortable where she was.
   6. I still felt guilty, but I did not bring her home.
4. What I learned about dealing with a crisis.
   1. I learned that, sometimes, there are no simple, neat solutions to crises.
   2. I found out that relying on the advice of others, especially family members and experts, can be useful.
   3. I realized that, during this crisis, I was not thinking about my mother’s welfare as much as I was concerned with my own sense of guilt.
   4. Now, years after my mother died, I am still attempting to convince myself that I made the right choice.

Notice that the outline begins with a title. Sometimes, it is better to choose a title once the outline has been completed. The first paragraph in the essay will be based on Roman numeral one in the outline. Each of the following paragraphs should be based on each of the subsequent Roman numeral sections. Your opening paragraph should clearly state your topic or thesis statement. You may need two or three sentences in order to clearly make your point.

Once you are sure that your outline is complete, you are ready for the third step, writing the essay. Follow the outline, adding additional sentences to clarify and fortify your points. Your second and third paragraphs (You may write more) should each contain information about a topic that relates to your thesis statement. Do not add extraneous ideas. Do not write more than you need to in order to explain your point.

Your concluding paragraph should reiterate the thesis statement. The last sentence or two should resolve the issue under discussion so that the reader develops a sense of completion. After reading your essay, he or she should be thinking, “Okay. I understand what this person has in mind” or “I see his (or her) point” or something of that nature.

The final, very important step is to carefully-very carefully proofread what you have written. Do not rely only on your computer’s Spell Check function. A good idea is to print what you have written and read it-word for word. You are more likely to catch errors when reading a printed page than when you read from a computer monitor. Some people find it helpful to point to each word with a pencil or pen, as they read. Don’t be reluctant to mark up your paper, if you find errors or think of a better way to say what you have written.

Remember, your MBA admissions essay should be a reflection of your best effort. If you can submit a carefully organized, clearly written piece of writing that is free of grammar, punctuation, spelling, and usage errors, then you are accomplishing your goal of creating an essay that is worth reading.

You may want to have a peer read over your essay or you may wish to use the services of a professional editing organization:

• http://www.papercheck.com/grammar.asp
• http://www.proof-reading.com/essay_editing.asp

Your essay will be a mark of your excellence; make sure you take the time to re-read and revise your final copy.

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